a briefing document

site map

C O L O U R K E 'Y

advertising
disclaimer

Index

ecological collapse
a green history of the world
The end of the line
Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse
The Collapse of Complex Societies

ecological collapse

For several years I have been whingeing that this book should be written. Now it has, hot off the presses - January 2005.

I have read about half of the book so far. Usually, I wait until I have completed a book and mulled it awhile before commenting on and reviewing it. However, I think the lessons of this book are so important that I am going to recommend it without waiting my usual process.

This book, Collapse, is ponderous at times, but it is vital that the data gets ‘out there’ as soon as possible. Collapse is at least good enough to serve the purpose and that is enough for me lacking anything else since the rapidly dating A green history of the world.

One month later!
While Jared Diamond does refer in passing to specific industries from his own knowledge, such as oil, mining and forestry, his discussion of the nuts and bolts of ecology is much more limited than is Ponting’s. The strength of the book is in the collecting together of large numbers of case studies of previous collapsing societies and societies under stress.

Several reviews have waxed lyrical about the 100 of 550 pages that are devoted to difficulties in Norse lands. As far as I am concerned, the book would have been better without it. Diamond writes in lifeless, tedious prose, and struggling through the book I regard as hard work. In fact, he could have lost yet another hundred pages to great advantage.

Nevertheless, as with so much poorly written science popularisation, this is probably the best you have at the moment. It does not, however, fully surplant Ponting’s work, reviewed below. In summary, the prime value of this book is in the case studies, which fortunately comprise the bulk of the book. Unless you are coming new to this area, better to regard this work as a data source, than to bring expectations of theoretical insight to the joy of reading it.

Collapse by Jared Diamond, Viking/Penguin, December 2004, hbk, 0670033375 $17.97 [Barnes & Noble.com] [Not listed as published yet in the UK.]

A green history of the world by C. Ponting
[the GoldenYak rating would be substantially higher, but for the criticisms noted below.]
	$11.20 (amazon.com) Reprint edition (April 1993), Penguin USA , 0140176608 pbk
	£10.13 (amazon.co.uk) Reprint edition (April 1993), Penguin, 0140176608 pbk

This book endlessly catalogues the despoliation of planetary resources in a wide range of areas of history, activities and geography.

At times it goes over the top, as is common with material coming out of the evangelising green lobby. This can undermine the message at times, when the political agenda tends to overwhelm the real on the ground facts, or when the author is carried away with the shallow ‘capitalism bad’ mantra.

There are very real problems with population and resource pressures. It does no good to exaggerate these problems, as that makes them too easy to be dismissed by those who would rather not face the problems, but instead hope to carry on with ‘business as usual’.

The book is now a dozen years out of date, which is a very long time in this growing field. It could very much do with an update. However, the wide ranging history covered, its application to the rise and fall of civilisations and its dire warning for the future, make this a resource of considerable value.

This book should form part of any modern civics curriculum, but should be read and used with caution.

 

Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse

.rtf version (requires MS Word or similar)
google cache html (not so pretty, but also not so MS dependant)

Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse is probably worth a quick scan, despite being over-loaded by redundant jargon. The item compares catastrophically collapsing civilisations with those adjusting to a lesser but more stable lifestyle through varying accidents.

“These parallel differences between R-selected and K-selected nonhuman species. A society that maximizes its production of capital, like an R-selected species, prospers in an environment with substantial uncaptured resources but falters once these are exhausted. Its successors are likely to be societies that, like K-selected species, use key resources more sustainably at the cost of decreased production of capital. Nonhuman climax communities also typically display a higher diversity of species, but a lower population per species, than earlier seral stages, and produce notably lower volumes of biomass per unit time (Odum 1969).

“Broadly similar changes often distinguish precollapse and postcollapse societies. Thus the collapse of the western Roman Empire, for example, could be seen as a succession process in which one seral stage, dominated by a single sociopolitical "species" that maximized capital production at the cost of inefficiency, was replaced by a more diverse community of societies, consisting of many less populous "species" better adapted to their own local conditions, and producing capital at lower but more sustainable rates. [...] ”

‘Seral’ or ‘seres’ is really just another word for ‘stage’: a presumed arrangement.

The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology)

by Joseph Tainter, Colin Renfrew, first published 1988 Cambridge University Press, reprinted 1990, 052138673X $36.99 (amazon.com) / £23.99 (amazon.co.uk)

The authors appear to take an information-theoretic approach to social collapse. This looks either trivial or unconvincing or irrelevant in the context of the ecological collapse, but you may wish to know about it.

From a review at amazon:

“[...] the "number of challenges with which the Universe can confront a society is, for practical purposes, infinite," complex societies need to keep on increasing their level of complexity in order to survive new challenges. Tainter's thesis is that these "investments in additional complexity" produce fewer and fewer returns with time.

“The hunter-gatheres of the above example incur costs as they try to solve their food-shortage problem. If they conquer their neighbours, they have to garrison those territories, thus raising the cost of government. If they start agriculture on a larger or more intense scale in their own territories, they have to create a new class of citizens to man the farms, distribute and store the grain, and guard it from animals and invaders. In either case, the increases in access to energy (food) are offset somewhat by the increased cost of social complexity.”

related material
conservation on a personal level

email abelard at abelard.org

© abelard, 2005,09 march

all rights reserved

the address for this document is http://www.abelard.org/briefings/civilisations.htm

1500 words words
prints as 14 A4 pages (on my printer and set-up)